“Sailing sucks.” The resentful face turned to see whether I would take offence. I took none. If anything I felt a chill pity, for here was a boy born to the pleasures of the richest society on earth, and who had thrown them away with one twist of a motorcycle’s grip. At the same time I felt some scorn. I’d known scores of people in hospital who, denied the chance to walk, faced their lives with a courage that made me feel inadequate. Charles Kassouli, though, was clearly not cut from the same cloth.
“You’ve never sailed?” I asked him.
“I told you. Sailing sucks.”
“Charles owns a motor-cruiser,” Jill-Beth said in an attempt to chivvy him into cheefulness.
“Are you dancing, JB?” He threw away his cigarette and swivelled his chair away from me.
“Sure, Charlie.” She walked beside his electric wheelchair on to the dance floor and I watched how unself-consciously she gyrated in front of him. She grinned at me, but I turned away because a voice had spoken in my ear. “Captain Sandman?”
The speaker was a tall and fair-haired man who had broad shoulders beneath his white and braided uniform coat. He offered me a slight bow of his head. “Captain Sandman?” he asked again.
He had a Scandinavian accent.
“Yes.”
“If you’re ready, sir?” He gestured towards the big house.
I looked for Jill-Beth, but she had disappeared with Kassouli’s son, and so I followed the uniformed manservant into the great house that was more like a palace. We entered through a garden room hung with cool watercolour landscapes. A door led to a long air-conditioned hallway lined with the most superb ship models of the eighteenth century. Naval museums would have yearned for just one such model, but Kassouli owned a score of them. The walls were hung with pictures of ancient naval battles. An open door revealed a conservatory where a long indoor swimming pool rippled under palms.
At the hallway’s end the Scandinavian opened both leaves of a gilded door and bowed me into a library where he left me alone.
It was a lovely room; windowless, but perfectly proportioned.
It was lined with expensive leather-bound editions in English, French, Greek and Arabic. On rosewood tables in front of the library stacks were more ship models, but these were of Kassouli’s modern fleet. There were supertankers and bulk carriers, all painted with the Kassouli Line’s emblem of a striking kestrel. Each ship’s name began and ended with a K. Kalik, Kerak, Kanik, Komek. In the trade it was called the Kayak Line; a slighting nickname for one of the world’s great merchant fleets.
And a fleet run, I thought, by a modern merchant prince; a Le-vantine who had drawn me across the globe. I was suddenly very nervous. I stared up at the paintings which hung above the bookshelves. They were not pictures calculated to reassure a nervous Briton; they showed the battles of Bunker Hill, Saratoga, Yorktown, and, from a later war, New Orleans. The canvases were dark with varnish; the patina of ancient wealth giving gloss to a new American’s fortune.
On a table in the room’s centre there was a handsomely mounted family photograph. Yassir Kassouli, his plump face proud, sat next to his wife. She was a fair-haired, good-looking woman with amused eyes. Behind them stood Nadeznha and Charles; proud children, wholesome children, the finest products of the world’s richest melting pot. I saw how their father’s Mediterranean blood had dominated in their faces, but on Nadeznha I could see an echo of her mother’s humorous eyes.
“A photograph taken before the tragedies.” The voice startled me.
I turned to see a tall, thick-set and balding man standing in a doorway. It was Yassir Kassouli. His skin was very pale, as though he had seen little sunlight in the last few months. What was left of his hair was white. In the family photograph he had appeared as a man in his prime, but now he had the look of old age. Only his eyes, dark and suspicious, showed the immense and animal force of this immigrant who had made one of America’s great fortunes. He was in evening dress and bowed a courteous greeting. “I have to thank you, Captain Sandman, for coming all this way to see me.” I muttered some inanity about it being my pleasure.
He crossed to the table and lifted the photograph. “Before the tragedies. You met my son?”
“Indeed, sir.” The ‘sir’ came quite naturally.
“I raised my children according to Western tenets, Captain Sandman. To my daughter I gave freedom, and to my son pleasure. I do not think, on the whole, that I did well.” He said the last words drily, then crossed to a liquor cabinet. “You drink Irish whisky, I believe.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Jameson or Bushmills?” He had a New England accent. If it had not been for his name, and for the very dark eyes, I’d have taken him for a Wasp broker or banker.
“Either.”
He poured my whiskey, then helped himself to Scotch. As he finished pouring, the door opened and his son, escorted by Jill-Beth, wheeled himself into the room. Kassouli acknowledged their arrival by a gesture suggesting they helped themselves to liquor. “You don’t mind, Captain, if my son joins us?”
“Of course not, sir.”
He brought me my whisky that had been served without ice in a thick crystal glass. “Allow me to congratulate you on your Victoria Cross, Captain. I believe it is a very rare award these days?”
“Thank you.” I felt clumsy in the face of his suave courtesy.
“Do you smoke, Captain Sandman?”
“No, sir.”
“I’m glad. It’s a filthy habit. Shall we sit?” He gestured at the sofas in front of the fireplace.
We sat. Jill-Beth and Charles Kassouli positioned themselves at the back of the room, as if they knew they were present only to ob-serve. The son’s earlier and surly defiance had been muted to a respectful silence and I suspected that Charles Kassouli lived in some fear of his formidable father. He certainly did not light a cigarette in his father’s presence.
Yassir Kassouli thanked me for rescuing Jill-Beth. He thanked me again for coming to America. He spoke for a few minutes of his own history, of how he had purchased two tank-landing craft at the end of the Second World War and used them to found his present fortunes. “Most of that fortune,” he said in self-deprecation, “was based on smuggling. A man could become very rich carrying cigarettes from Tangiers to Spain in the late forties.
Naturally, when I became an American citizen, I gave up such a piratical existence.”
He asked after my father and expressed his regrets at what had happened. “I knew Tommy,” he said, “not well, but I liked him. You will pass on my best wishes?” I promised I would. Kassouli then enquired what my future was, and smiled when I said that it depended on ocean currents and winds. “I’ve often wished I could be such an ocean gypsy myself,” Kassouli said, “but alas.”
“Alas.” I echoed him.
The word served to make him look at his family portrait. I watched his profile, seeing the lineaments of the thin, savage face that had become fleshy with middle age. “In my possession,” he said suddenly, “I have the weather charts and satellite photographs of the North Atlantic for the week in which my daughter was killed.”
“Ah.” The suddenness with which he had introduced the subject of his daughter’s death rather wrong-footed me.
“Perhaps you would like to see them?” He clicked his fingers and Jill-Beth dutifully opened a bureau drawer and brought me a thick file of papers.
I spilt the photographs and grey weatherfax charts on to my lap.
Each one was marked with a red-ink cross to show where Nadeznha Bannister had died. I leafed through them as Kassouli watched me.
“You’ve sailed a great deal, Captain Sandman?” he asked me.